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The refreshments received even more praise than Edna had predicted, for not a crumb of gingerbread, not a single maple-sugar cream, nor a drop of raspberry shrub was left, and the honorary member went home in an exalted frame of mind. On the very evening of this meeting, while Edna was looking over her favorite page of her father's paper, she heard him say to his wife. "Humph.
Here is a simple-faced young peasant-couple with butter and eggs and chickens ravishingly displayed; here is a smooth-checked, blackeyed, black-haired young girl, looking as if an infusion of Indian blood had darkened the red of her cheeks, presiding over a stock of onions, potatoes, beets, and turnips; there an old woman with a face carven like a walnut, behind a flattering array of cherries and pears; yonder a whole family trafficking in loaves of brown-bread and maple-sugar in many shapes of pious and grotesque device.
The baby, meanwhile, kept on sucking his maple-sugar and staring into the novel darkness. The woman's breath began to come too fast, her knees began to feel as if they might turn to water at any moment. At last, when within perhaps fifty paces of the shack, to her infinite relief she saw a dark, tall figure take shape just over the top of a bush, at the turn of the trail.
"Waal, sir," said Ephraim Taft, a wholesale dealer in maple-sugar and flavored lozenges, "you kin talk 'bout your new-fashioned dishes an' high-falutin vittles; but, when you come right down to it, there ain't no better eatin' than a dish o' baked pork 'n' beans." "That's so, b'gosh!" chorused the others. "The truth o' the matter is," continued Mr.
Into the sugar-house they went. The small room was hot and steamy, and in the middle of it in a zinc-lined tank the foaming sap was boiling furiously. Beside it stood McMasters, Mr. Carlton's foreman, a thermometer in his hand. "Good-morning, Mr. Bob," he said. "So you are coming to cast an eye on the maple-sugar! Last week we made syrup and bottled it. Not a bad day's work, eh?"
When the sap of the sugar-maple is boiled down to the consistence of syrup and allowed to stand, it sometimes deposits a considerable amount of sand; indeed, this is probably always present in some degree, and justifies, perhaps, the occasional complaint of the grittiness of maple-sugar. But it is a native grit, and not chargeable upon the sugar-makers.
Then I recognized that they were maple-sugar trees. The farmers had cleaned out the other species, and this primitive method of forestry had produced the finest maples it had ever been my good-fortune to see. Indiana was flatter than Ohio, not so well watered, and therefore less heavily timbered.
It was now April, and for some days Malachi and John had been very busy, assisted by the Strawberry; for the time had come for tapping the maple-trees, to make the maple-sugar, and Mrs. Campbell had expressed a wish that she could be so supplied with an article of such general consumption, and which they could not obtain but by the bateaux which went to Montreal.
Of course we have other maple trees scattered about the farm and David taps those, too; but most of our sugar comes from this orchard." "Did your grandfather make maple-sugar to sell?" "Goodness, no! He made it to use. White sugar, you must understand, was not so common in the olden days as it is now.
So for the first year Squire Potter took it on shares, and, as he principally seeded it down to rye, why, we sold the rye and got a little money, but 'twa'n't a great deal, no more than we wanted for clothes the next winter. Aunt Langdon sent us down a lot of maple-sugar from Lee, and when we wanted molasses we made it out of that.
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